


haven't met the new me yet

by bumblegremlin



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:15:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28885209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bumblegremlin/pseuds/bumblegremlin
Summary: Ronan looks into the mirror of the small Aglionby bathroom and doesn't recognize himself.He fixes it.(Or, Ronan shaves his head for the first time.)
Relationships: Richard Gansey III & Ronan Lynch
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	haven't met the new me yet

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't sure about posting this because it's so short, but hey, I've had this tidbit of Ronan having a wee mental breakdown and shaving his head floating around in my mind for a while so.... enjoy.

In the small bathroom of the Aglionby dorm room they’d hastily moved him into for those first few nights, Ronan looked up from the sink and locked eyes with himself in the mirror. He had to grip the counter and hold on through the double vision of seeing his own reflection. It looked exactly like him. He didn’t recognize it at all.

His mouth was an unhappy line, his nose nearing a snarl, and his eyes were haunted, colder and sadder and angrier than they’d ever been. It was a stranger’s face. His hair was the same. It was the hair that Declan liked to mess up and Aurora liked to smooth down, that he got from his father, that appeared in every single picture of him in the - oh fuck, the _Barns._ Ronan’s knuckles were white on the countertop. He was angry. Suddenly it didn’t seem fair to him that this mirror image could look so much like Ronan Lynch and so unlike himself at the same time. 

He fixed it. In the middle of the night with an electric razor he demanded from a junior on his floor who had short edges. The guy looked like he was going to give Ronan a piece of his mind for banging on his door at two in the fucking morning until he saw the look on Ronan’s face and chickened out. Ronan didn’t ask to borrow the buzzer. The junior didn’t say he could keep it. He could come and fucking ask for it back if he wanted. They both knew he wouldn’t.

So Ronan stared down the fucked up doppleganger in the mirror and shaved his head down right to the scalp. His hair was thick, and curly, and came off in tangled clumps that left uneven patches he had to fight into submission with the razor. Everyone had always loved Ronan’s hair. It was all over the floor and the sink now. They could fucking have it. They’d taken everything else anyway.

When it was done, Ronan looked nothing like himself. 

The stranger’s face had a stranger’s hair, and it all screamed _broken_ , as horrible on the outside as it felt on the inside. It didn’t make a damn thing better but at least it matched.

It was unbearable. It was easier. Because if he couldn’t recognize himself or his life at least he didn’t have to see it every time he passed a mirror, reminding him. 

Being Ronan Lynch meant something very different now. And it looked that way.

Gansey didn’t say a thing about the hair.

He took one look at him. Ronan let him. He could feel spider-webbed fractures underneath his skin, and he was sure Gansey could see them, could see how close Ronan was to falling apart. But he didn’t say a thing about that.

He said, “I’m talking to the office. You’re moving in with me.”

Ronan moved into Monmouth.

**Author's Note:**

> come find me @dauntlessdeclan on tumblr!


End file.
